“That seems to be a recurring habit,” she gritted out and turned for the door, her silk robe hissing against the floorboards.
“Diana,” he called out gently.
She didn’t stop.
“Diana!”
She didn’t look back. She left him standing in the amber light of the fire, the scandalous book lying abandoned between them, a silent witness to a marriage that was still, after all this time, unmade.
CHAPTER 9
“Tell me honestly, Harris. Would I trust the man with my life?”
Alexander stood before the tall mirror as his valet adjusted the cuff of his coat. The morning light filtered through the high windows of Rosewood House, pale gold spilling across the dark wood furniture and the heavy carpet beneath his boots.
Harris paused only briefly before answering.
“Yes, Your Grace. Without hesitation.”
Alexander watched the older man’s reflection carefully.
Harris had served him for years. That much he had learned through the household staff and the quiet certainty with which the man moved about his rooms. The valet carried himself with the calm efficiency of someone who knew his master well.
“You did not even ask which man I meant,” Alexander said mildly.
Harris finished smoothing the sleeve of Alexander’s coat before stepping back with a small nod of approval.
“You are meeting with Mr. Cartwright this morning, Your Grace. The estate manager.” His lips twitched faintly. “I assumed that was the man in question.”
Alexander let out a low breath through his nose. “Yes.”
The name still meant very little to him. It sat in his mind like a label pinned onto a stranger’s coat, something he had been told to recognize without possessing the history that should have given it meaning.
There were far too many things like that now. Faces, titles, places that everyone around him spoke of with easy familiarity, while he could only observe them with the detached awareness of a man studying a life that seemed to belong to someone else entirely.
“Tell me more about him,” Alexander prompted.
Harris met his gaze steadily in the mirror.
“Mr. Cartwright has served the Rosewood estates since before your father passed, Your Grace. Nearly twenty years.” He folded his hands neatly before him calmly, as though the matter wasalready settled in his mind. “I have never known him to be anything but loyal.”
Alexander turned away from the mirror and began to cross the room slowly, his boots making quiet contact with the thick carpet as he moved.
Loyalty is a fragile currency, easily claimed and far more rarely proven.
Under normal circumstances, he suspected he would have trusted his own judgment on such matters without hesitation. But now his instincts existed in a strange, uneasy tension with the gaps inside his mind.
He had awakened in a world that already knew him, populated by people who spoke to him with the ease of long acquaintance and who seemed to expect from him a familiarity he could not return. Yet he stood among them with the uncomfortable awareness of a man walking through a life that did not quite feel like his own.
Except Diana.
The thought appeared with such sudden clarity that it made him pause beside the window.
He did not remember marrying her. And yet every time he looked at her, something inside him responded with an intensity that refused to be ignored. The reaction came from somewheredeeper, from instincts that seemed to recognize her even when his mind could not supply the history that should have justified them.
But what unsettled him more was that the memory of the previous night rose suddenly in his mind with startling clarity.
The way she had been sitting in that armchair in the library with the candlelight falling softly over her hair. The moment when she had looked up at him with that mixture of defiance and uncertainty that seemed to define her entirely.
